PAN DORA writes:

When you write about women in the military, in many cases you seem to have excessive interest in their marital status, possible childbearing plans, current parental status and other matters. Why do you not concern yourself equally with these matters when the servicemember is male?

Laura writes:

My interest in their marital status and childbearing plans is not excessive at all. It is healthy and normal. It’s extremely immoral to send women to war and very few nations in history have ever seriously entertained the idea of putting wives and mothers into battle. Why would the Marines accept female recruits? Only because they have been pressured to do so, not because it makes for a better fighting force or helps the nation. It weakens the nation. For a society to fail to understand the need for nurture and aggression is suicidal, utterly catastrophic.

A man can be soldier and fulfill his duties as husband and father. A woman cannot be a soldier and fulfill her duties as wife and mother.

Men and women have different bodies. Women give birth to children. (I’m surprised you didn’t know this, but that’s okay.) Women are pregnant for more than nine months and what they do during that period can affect the health of another human being. While women are already much weaker than men, pregnancy makes them even weaker and more fragile.  Women do all kinds of difficult jobs now when pregnant but it’s wrong for society to approve of it because the welfare of the unborn is at stake.

Women are suited to caring for children in many ways that men are not. For instance, babies are heathlier when they are fed by their mothers for at least a full year, preferably longer. It’s hard enough not being cared for by one’s own mother if she’s working close by. But when she is in a foreign country or situations of grave danger, that is so frightening for a child that he can only cope by inwardly detaching himself from his mother. Having a father who is a soldier is hard too, but there is the immense pride a child feels in his father. The father who is a soldier is doing what all fathers rightly do; he is protecting others and giving of himself. The mother who is a soldier is doing what no mother does in exposing herself to harm and thus leaving the child potentially alone.

Usually military wives help their children cope and make it easier when a father is away. But a father cannot ease a mother’s absence in the same way because of the elemental bond between mother and child.

Speaking of military wives, men do better when their wives care for them. I cannot think of any reason why a man would want a wife in the military except the desire for her salary or the very mistaken belief that she needs to be in the military to be happy.

                                — Comments —

James P. writes:

Pan Dora writes: 

When you write about women in the military, in many cases you seem to have excessive interest in their marital status, possible childbearing plans, current parental status and other matters. Why do you not concern yourself equally with these matters when the servicemember is male? 

Does Pan Dora really need to be told that women are not the same as men? Apparently she does! 

When a man in the military has children, it does not affect his ability to do his duties at all, nor does it make more work for his comrades, nor does it reduce the combat effectiveness of his unit (or ship or aircraft squadron). When a woman in the military has children, her ability to do her duties is profoundly reduced if not entirely negated, it makes more work for her comrades, and it reduces the combat effectiveness of her unit.

Araminty writes:

I’m not trying to be rude, but I’m amazed that anyone can even wonder about why women’s marital and parental status matter in the military. It is simply so obvious, so commonsensical! I can’t imagine Pan Dora could possibly be a parent. Has the mother become so inessential in our society that we think nothing of sending women away from their (dependent, fragile, developing) children and into war? The question itself is a testament to our culture. That is not good.

Laura writes:

For many people, this is no longer a commonsensical issue. They genuinely don’t recognize the universal claim of children on the time and inclinations of adults nor do they believe that women are innately less aggressive and weaker than men.

Lisa, who served in the military, writes:

I do not mean to sound hokey or Gaiaesque, but if a people do not put “the womb” (and all womanly functions entailed in the nurture of children) on a functional sort of pedestal, that people are doomed. Women are being drawn into ANY job rather than motherhood, which is not a “job,” but an irreplaceable role within a God-blessed and healthy society. While a “female midshipman” at a military academy, I observed much that was detrimental to men, to women, to that branch of service, and to the society and families of which hey were part (or would one day form), all for the sake of a Marxist athiest’s social engineering experiment.

Joe Long writes:

Alternative history is very popular these days, and I admit an interest in it, lowbrow though it is.

So here’s some alternate-timeline speculation to try on: Imagine that, in 1941, our military were “gender-integrated” in the current fashion, and forced to fight the Second World War that way – from a high percentage of the soldiers storming Omaha Beach, to the highest levels of command; that every B-17 falling from the sky carried four or five women to their fiery death along with their male comrades; that each submarine hunting Japanese merchant shipping in the Pacific had to settle the coed restrooms/no showers issue; that the Red Ball Express running supplies to Patton’s army was half female. Not exploits of individual viragos, mind you, but everyday women the way we know and interact with them, on every combat team, air, sea, or land. Not WACS or WAVES or “Free a Marine To Fight!” admin support….

Imagine (and this is easier) that neither the Japanese, nor the Germans, adopted this policy.

A full committment of the population in that mode, would certainly have left a lost generation at home. Another significant result, of course, would have been that that generation would have had to grow up eating saurkraut – with chopsticks.

Alex writes from England:

I think one of the most troubling images of ‘warrior women’ that I ever saw, had an American female soldier (on duty in Iraq) posing with a rifle cradled in her arms, pouches of ammunition over her breasts, and a foolish grin on her face. The battle helmet that she was wearing had a photograph of her baby stuck on it.

A Grateful Reader writes: 

Araminty writes: 

“Has the mother become so inessential in our society that we think nothing of sending women away from their (dependent, fragile, developing) children and into war?” 

The masses of our society think nothing of sending women away from their (dependent, fragile, developing) children in order for the mother to work at a job all day—and work for the military is now seen as just another job. This separation of parents and children is but a small step on the way to a restructuring of society—by the “cultural Marxists.” 

The July/August 2011 issue of TouchstoneMagazine provides a good article about the origins of such incremental destruction of the family. “Global Power Grab: The Cultural Marxists’ Strategic Assault on Religion, Life and Family” by Patrick F. Fagan and William L. Saunders traces the roots of anti-family efforts to the writings of Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels. Because he saw the collapse of the family structure as necessary for the coming Communist world order, Engels writes, “The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian (marriage), and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male.” He writes, “The old society, built on groups based on ties of sex, bursts asunder in the collision of the newly-developed social classes.” 

Most of the Touchstone article deals with the treaties that the “cultural Marxists” have crafted, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). These “cultural Marxists,” such as those from the Center for Reproductive Rights, acknowledge that “there is a stealth quality to the work: we are achieving incremental recognition of values without a huge amount of scrutiny from the opposition. These lower profile victories will gradually put us in a strong position to assert a broad consensus around our assertions.” 

There is no middle ground in this cultural war: The authors of the Touchstone article express it thus, “The two sides in this clash have opposing views as to how sexuality and reproduction are structured, one seeing them as linked to, and the other as decoupled from, a sense of creation, or of the Creator. There is no reconciling these views. They clash.” 

Decoupling sex from creation, through contraception, abortion, and a general perspective that sex is a form of entertainment, make women and men more equal—that is, equally less human.

A reader writes:

Laura writes: “…women are innately less aggressive and weaker than men.” 

Why is there no uproar from men about men’s lives being more endangered by having to serve in combat zones with women? No doubt those in the service would have their chances of promotion ruined by protesting, unless perhaps they can present a united front, but why is there no concerted protest to the government? I think there are also women – whose husbands and sons are at risk – who would join the protest as well.

Laura writes:

Here are a few basic reasons, in  my opinion, why more men have not protested or have not been heard when they have protested:

1) Many are in a state of bewilderment that things have gone as far as they have.

2) The intelligentsia, including top commanders in the military, controls the airwaves and it ardently believes in egalitarianism.

3) We have not faced a grave enough threat to our security to make it a pressing issue.

4) Men in the military risk their livelihood if they speak out against the institutionalization of feminism.

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